Full control of qubit rotations in a voltage-biased superconducting flux qubit

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates full qubit control on the Bloch sphere for a voltage-biased superconducting flux qubit, enabling arbitrary rotations through voltage, magnetic flux, and junction ratio tuning.

Contribution

It introduces a voltage-controlled flux qubit allowing complete qubit rotation control, including the previously unexplored regime where the Josephson energy ratio exceeds one.

Findings

Full control of qubit rotations on the Bloch sphere achieved.

Voltage tuning enables rotations about y axis, complementing x and z.

Decoherence effects due to voltage fluctuations estimated.

Abstract

We study a voltage-controlled version of the superconducting flux qubit [Chiorescu et al., Science 299, 1869 (2003)] and show that full control of qubit rotations on the entire Bloch sphere can be achieved. Circuit graph theory is used to study a setup where voltage sources are attached to the two superconducting islands formed between the three Josephson junctions in the flux qubit. Applying a voltage allows qubit rotations about the y axis, in addition to pure x and z rotations obtained in the absence of applied voltages. The orientation and magnitude of the rotation axis on the Bloch sphere can be tuned by the gate voltages, the external magnetic flux, and the ratio alpha between the Josephson energies via a flux-tunable junction. We compare the single-qubit control in the known regime alpha<1 with the unexplored range alpha>1 and estimate the decoherence due to voltage fluctuations.